Importance of sound

LINK 1 (LAFilm.edu)

“Poor sound can ruin an otherwise spectacular production.”

  • The Importance of Sound in Film

    • Elements

      • Human Voices

      • Music

      • SFX

    • Immersion

      • “Sounds and dialogue must perfectly sync with the actions in a film without delay and must sound the way they look. If a sound doesn’t quite match the action on screen, the action itself isn’t nearly as believable.”

      • Asynchronous Sound Effects

        • Essentially Diegetic Zone

        • Sounds that fill the areas ambiance without being on screen

    • Successful Audio

      • Memorable and quality scores/motifs

        • Star Wars, Jaws

  • Sound in Games

    • Jesse Schell, a video game designer and CEO of Schell Games, has said that “sound is what truly convinces the mind is in a place; in other words, ‘hearing is believing.’”

    • Without realistic and high-quality audio, the audiovisual component fails to create a ‘relatable’ experience with the audience/players thus failing to provide an immersive experience.

LINK 2 (d'Escriván)

  • Sound Effects

    • Early Sound Design (66) (3.)

      • Early 30’s Russian synthesized paper drawings, King Kong growling noises

      • “In The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), the opening flight and subsequent landing of a UFO calls for sounds that intend to make the scene believable whilst at the same time instilling a sense of awe in the viewer. In The War of The Worlds (1953), although the music is performed by a conventional orchestra throughout, the moments when the aliens need to be characterised, synthetic or manipulated sounds are used, sometimes leading into or out of the orchestral texture.” (67)

    • “A sound ‘effect’ is not the actual sound of what we see on screen, so much as the kind of sound we expect to hear; the effect of the sound. Sound effects may also reflect cinematic listening perspective. They must follow the dramatic guidelines of film narrative to be useful, thus becoming involved in an artistic pursuit even if their origins appear largely functional.

    • Processing sounds

      • Ben Burtt “the sound of futuristic cars (edited tape recordings of a jet-plane fly-by) and motorcycles (processed sounds of women screaming, recorded inside a bathroom).” (70)

    • “Sound designers are increasingly entrusted with complex non-diegetic tasks that were formerly only performed by film music, thus exploring the more psychological dimensions of sound.” (72)

    • “Live cinema, computer games and immersive audio installations all derive in some way from the cinematic experience; the development of sound for film stretches beyond film.” (72)

LINK 3 (Marcello)

Relationship of music, dialogue, and effects with the film’s footage (59)

Sound effects, dialogue, and music are able to tell extracontextual information to the viewer or enhance the visual componenet (60)

  • Voice acting vs voice over

    • VA helped developed styles (62)

    • television, games, film

    • Laban method; influenced from dancing

      • art of movement

  • “The sound mix can enrich an audience’s perception of emotionality in a filmic character; it can align an audience with character’s perspective, or it can create a space between the audience and the character, often accentuating the unusual aspects of the vocal performance. Similarly, sound can be used to heighten the “realism” of the performance and the film, or it can be manipulated to call attention to the actor and his or her acting style” (69).

Overall sound’s physiological effect is the reason why it is so powerful